Edisto Beach and Charleston SC

Edisto Beach and Charleston SC

We just got back from a week in Charleston SC and Edisto Beach SC. We had most meals in our RV but of course in this part of the country, we had to spend a few dollars on seafood, so here goes...

Monday, lunch at the Seewee Restaurant in Awendaw SC, just north of Charleston on US 17. Pretty neat place to eat inside the old country store, and not your made up a few years ago country store either. This one actually goes back to the 1920s or so. The meal consisted of EXCELLENT fried shrimp for me and Fish Stew for DW. Both were very good and perfectly cooked. Coming from the south where eating hush puppies is a lifestyle, I thought the crust on these was just a little excessive, but other than that it was really very good, and as it turned out, one of the best meals of the entire trip.

Dinner Tuesday at Bowen's Island. Well, we missed oyster season by about 3 days, but the shrimp and flounder were perfect. Both as fresh as they get and fried just right. Very lightly breaded just enough to give them a crust without taking away from the flavor. And the hush puppies were pretty much perfect too. Eating out on the dock watching the sun go down has to be one of the great little pleasures of a trip like this.

Thursday Dinner: Old Post Office on Edisto Island SC. The place has been closed for a couple of years and reopened about a year ago. The place has received an overall facelift and the fresh paint and a little upfit of the decor gave it a clean look. We were greeted at the door by Adam and had a short chat with him about the reopening. Philip Bardin is back as head Chef with his own twist on low country cousine. We started with the Asparagus soup. Made with cream it was very tasty, but not quite as "asparagusy" as I would have liked, but a good starter none the less. My entree was the roasted scallops topped with choron sauce. The sides were cheese grits and Squash casserole. All were perfectly cooked. The scallops were excellent, the grits creamy and the squash caserole was great. Not to detract too much from the overall meal but the Choron sauce was just not thick enough to suit me, however the taste was excellent.

My wife had the baked Mahi Mahi with brown onion gravy and the same sides. The fish was fresh and cooked just right. It was such a huge slab of fish though that most of it ended up going home with us and became Friday's lunch.

While we didn't order it, a neighboring table ordered the Firecracker Flounder... a fried flounder topped with a jalapeno tomato sauce. It looked great and got no complaints from the person that ordered it.

After that there was no way we could come close to thinking about desert!

Friday dinner: Dean Walker & Family Seafood - Hollywood SC. This place is about a 20 minute ride from the island up a very scenic route. Dean's place looks like a recycled fast food restaurant on the outside, but inside they have put heavy wood paneling, ceilings and sea themed art all over the place. I went for the fried shrimp and my wife had the fried flounder. Both were lightly breaded and fried and cooked perfectly. I had a salad and she had coleslaw. The coleslaw was the creamy type which she doesn't like very well. But the seafood tasted fresh and was well cooked... and a lot of it as well. Again we ended up taking about half of the huge portions home with us for lunch the next day. Other items on their menu included the usual... oysters, scallops, clams, crab cakes, and catfish. And all were reasonably priced, especially compared to the places on the beach.

All in all, a great trip to a wonderful place and some really good seafood!

CB thanks for the rundown--glad you liked the Seewee and Bowens Island. I've still never been to the Old Post Office but glad they're reopened so I might get the chance. I'm going to have to check out Dean Walker & Family.

Coming from the south where eating hush puppies is a lifestyle, I thought the crust on these was just a little excessive, but other than that it was really very good, and as it turned out, one of the best meals of the entire trip.

When I was a kid and would visit the south I really liked hush puppies, but I always had them in the mountains of NC. Since I moved to SC they always taste oily and over fried to me. But I eat them anyway.

Oh crap! Now you've put me on the hot seat. I started to suggest someplace and all I could think was that my friend Cathy or her dad make the best ones. They used to have really good ones at Maurice's Piggie Park, but since I really haven't been back there for most of the last ten years I can't vouch for them anymore.

Addendum--I asked Julie 'so where around here has good hushpuppies?' and her first response was 'nowhere--Chris is right.' But then she remembered Duke's barbecue in Walterboro. In fact everything fried at either that one or the one in Ridgeland is really good.

OK now.. we should probably open up another thread dedicated to the various tastes and styles of the "hushpuppy". Thats kind of like saying "where do you get good cake or pie?" The styles are as varied as that. For some reason when i'm eating BBQ, i like them a little crustier.

So whats your pleasure... crusty outside and soft inside... lightly fried soft through out including very light golden brown crust? Cake like with sugar added or a little more course with onions? Some of the seafood places around here make them like rings....some are very elongated..

OK now.. we should probably open up another thread dedicated to the various tastes and styles of the "hushpuppy". Thats kind of like saying "where do you get good cake or pie?" The styles are as varied as that. For some reason when i'm eating BBQ, i like them a little crustier.

So whats your pleasure... crusty outside and soft inside... lightly fried soft through out including very light golden brown crust? Cake like with sugar added or a little more course with onions? Some of the seafood places around here make them like rings....some are very elongated..

Whats ur choice??? great topic.

Now you are talking. I have never paid enough attention to the differences until I kept having ones I didn't like. My memory says that the ones I had as a kid had onions in them. They were also small, kind of like tater tots. I like those. The big cripsy cake like ones just don't do it for me. In fact here are the ones from last week that finally set me off to complain about them. A thread on here might help me sort through my newly acquired hush puppy aversion.

I was going to save this shot for another thread, but maybe everyone out there can reflect on their favorite hush puppy experience.

Hope this hasn't hijacked the original purpose of this travel thread, sorry!

This is what I like to do with hushpuppies: pull them in half and stick them bread side down in my coleslaw to soak up the dressing (assuming it's good) and eat them like that. So they need to be fresh, not gummy and old inside, and not so tough outside that you can tunk-tunk them with your fingernail, and all that folderol around the outside, the extra stuff that means you just didn't spoon them out of the batter carefully? To me that's just unnecessary showing off. /makes the 'show me the hand' sign

I've noticed that a lot of NC barbecue joints are fond of the extruded hush puppy, the ones that look like tiny elongated footballs, and you make those from putting your batter in a large ketchup type bottle and sawing off the nozzle. You can squirt those straight in the batter and avoid the folderol altogether.